Friday, July 17, 2009

Last Morning Shoot of the Trip

How quickly time flies. I captured my first shots of the vacation two weeks ago and here I am posting the last sunrise shot of the trip. My next challenge will be sorting through everything once I get back to home base. And making a number of prints in the process.

This morning presented me with beautiful, if not a bit crisp, weather. Zero bugs, slight breeze, a touch of cloud. That said I'm also out of fresh ideas for these local shots - time is needed to venture further and scout new locations. But it's hard to get beyond the 5 minute walk out of the cabin to capture shots like this so early in the morning:

This was actually my first attempt experimenting with something called UniWB. It's a custom white balance that allows a more balanced base exposure in RAW. Conventional white balance settings, such as Daylight or Cloudy, push the reds too much. As such capturing this type of shot demands underexposing the green and blue channels to protect the red. This underexposure reduces details and increases noise in those channels. The UniWB setting is unique in that it allows proper exposure across all channels. The color balance is whacky - a sickly green - but that is corrected in post with more data available in each channel. I'm curious to see how this looks once it makes it to print.

This next is a variation on a theme from yesterday. I quite liked the beach curve shot that I converted to black and white. But it was taken in less than ideal circumstances so I wanted to capture a better quality shot in better light. This is what I ended up with, staying in color this time to exaggerate the complement between the blue water and yellow/orange sand.

And finally these knuckleheads lined up along the beach. "Rats with wings" as coined in the movie Finding Nemo. Don't know why, just found this amusing.

My next mission for today is finding some canola to shoot on the trip home. It's late to grow this year so not expecting much.